Daniel Berrigan, Another of my heroes, dies at 94

[Peter Lemkin]

Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94

By DANIEL LEWISAPRIL 30, 2016



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Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan gave an anti-war sermon at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, 1972. Credit William E. Sauro/The New York Times The Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet whose defiant protests helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War and landed him in prison, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 94.
His death, at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University, was confirmed by the Rev. James Martin, editor at large at America magazine, a national Catholic magazine published by the Jesuits.
The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic "new left," articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.
It was an essentially religious position, based on a stringent reading of the Scriptures that some called pure and others radical. But it would have explosive political consequences as Father Berrigan; his brother Philip, a Josephite priest; and their allies took their case to the streets with rising disregard for the law or their personal fortunes.
A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Md., and the subsequent trial of the so-called Catonsville Nine, a sequence of events that inspired an escalation of protests across the country; there were marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft cards and other acts of civil disobedience.
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Father Berrigan, right and his brother Philip Berrigan seized hundreds of draft records and set them on fire with homemade napalm in 1968. Credit United Press International The catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new riots in dozens of cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to the second floor, where the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished clerks, they seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to the parking lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm.
Some reporters had been told of the raid in advance. They were given a statement that said in part, "We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men but because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America." It added, "We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes."
In a year sick with images of destruction, from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the murder of Dr. King, a scene was recorded that had been contrived to shock people to attention, and did so. When the police came, the trespassers were praying in the parking lot, led by two middle-aged men in clerical collars: the big, craggy Philip, a decorated hero of World War II, and the ascetic Daniel, waiting peacefully to be led into the van.

Protests and Arrests

In the years to come, well into his 80s, Daniel Berrigan was arrested time and again, for greater or lesser offenses: in 1980, for taking part in the Plowshares raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa., where the Berrigan brothers and others rained hammer blows on missile warheads; in 2006, for blocking the entrance to the Intrepid naval museum in Manhattan.
"The day after I'm embalmed," he said in 2001, on his 80th birthday, "that's when I'll give it up."
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Father Berrigan being handcuffed in 2001 after he and others blocked an entrance to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan. Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press It was not for lack of other things to do. In his long career of writing and teaching at Fordham and other universities, Father Berrigan published a torrent of essays and broadsides and, on average, a book a year.
Among the more than 50 books were 15 volumes of poetry the first of which, "Time Without Number," won the prestigious Lamont Poetry Prize (now known as the James Laughlin Award), given by the Academy of American Poets, in 1957 as well as autobiography, social criticism, commentaries on the Old Testament prophets and indictments of the established order, both secular and ecclesiastic.
While he was known for his wry wit, there was a darkness in much of what Father Berrigan wrote and said, the burden of which was that one had to keep trying to do the right thing regardless of the near certainty that it would make no difference. In the withering of the pacifist movement and the country's general support for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, he saw proof that it was folly to expect lasting results.
"This is the worst time of my long life," he said in an interview with The Nation in 2008. "I have never had such meager expectations of the system."
What made it bearable, he wrote elsewhere, was a disciplined, implicitly difficult belief in God as the key to sanity and survival.
Many books by and about Father Berrigan remain in print, and a collection of his work over half a century, "Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings," was published in 2009.
He also had a way of popping up in the wider culture: as the "radical priest" in Paul Simon's song "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"; as inspiration for the character Father Corrigan in Colum McCann's 2009 novel, "Let the Great World Spin." He even had a small movie role, appearing as a Jesuit priest in "The Mission" in 1989.
But his place in the public imagination was pretty much fixed at the time of the Catonsville raid, as the impish-looking half of the Berrigan brothers traitors and anarchists in the minds of a great many Americans, exemplars to those who formed what some called the ultra-resistance.

After a trial that served as a platform for their antiwar message, the Berrigans were convicted of destroying government property and sentenced to three years each in the federal prison in Danbury, Conn. Having exhausted their appeals, they were to begin serving their terms on April 10, 1970.

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Father Berrigan, right, and a defense lawyer, William M. Kunstler, center, after he was sentenced to three years in federal prison in Danbury, Conn. Credit Associated Press Instead, they raised the stakes by going underground. The men who had been on the cover of Time were now on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list. As Daniel explained in a letter to the French magazine Africasia, he was not buying the "mythology" fostered by American liberals that there was a "moral necessity of joining illegal action to legal consequences." In any case, both brothers were tracked down and sent to prison.
Philip Berrigan had been the main force behind Catonsville, but it was mostly Daniel who mined the incident and its aftermath for literary meaning a process already underway when the F.B.I. caught up with him on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, on Aug. 11, 1970. There was "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," a one-act play in free verse drawn directly from the court transcripts, and "Prison Poems," written during his incarceration in Danbury.
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Father Berrigan served time for acts of civil disobedience. In "My Father," he wrote:
I sit here in the prison ward
nervously dickering with my ulcer
a half-tamed animal
raising hell in its living space
But in 500 lines the poem talks as well about the politics of resistance, memories of childhood terror and, most of all, the overbearing weight of his dead father:
I wonder if I ever loved him
if he ever loved us
if he ever loved me.
The father was Thomas William Berrigan, a man full of words and grievances who got by as a railroad engineer, labor union officer and farmer. He married Frida Fromhart and had six sons with her. Daniel, the fourth, was born on May 9, 1921, in Virginia, Minn.
When he was a young boy, the family moved to a farm near Syracuse to be close to his father's family.
In his autobiography, "To Dwell in Peace," Daniel Berrigan described his father as "an incendiary without a cause," a subscriber to Catholic liberal periodicals and the frustrated writer of poems of no distinction.
"Early on," he wrote, "we grew inured, as the price of survival, to violence as a norm of existence. I remember, my eyes open to the lives of neighbors, my astonishment at seeing that wives and husbands were not natural enemies."

Battles With the Church

Born with weak ankles, Daniel could not walk until he was 4. His frailty spared him the heavy lifting demanded of his brothers; instead he helped his mother around the house. Thus he seemed to absorb not only his father's sense of life's unfairness but also an intimate knowledge of how a man's rage can play out in the victimization of women.
At an early age, he wrote, he believed that the church condoned his father's treatment of his mother. Yet he wanted to be a priest. After high school he earned a bachelor's degree in 1946 from St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary in Hyde Park, N.Y., and a master's from Woodstock College in Baltimore in 1952. He was ordained that year.
Sent for a year of study and ministerial work in France, he met some worker-priests who gave him "a practical vision of the Church as she should be," he wrote. Afterward he spent three years at the Jesuits' Brooklyn Preparatory School, teaching theology and French, while absorbing the poetry of Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings and the 19th-century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. His own early work often combined elements of nature with religious symbols.
But he was not to become a pastoral poet or live the retiring life he had imagined. His ideas were simply turning too hot, sometimes even for friends and mentors like Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and the Trappist intellectual Thomas Merton.
At Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he was a popular professor of New Testament studies from 1957 to 1963, Father Berrigan formed friendships with his students that other faculty members disapproved of, inculcating in them his ideas about pacifism and civil rights. (One student, David Miller, became the first draft-card burner to be convicted under a 1965 law.)
Father Berrigan was effectively exiled in 1965, after angering the hawkish Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York. Besides Father Berrigan's work in organizing antiwar groups like the interdenominational Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, there was the matter of the death of Roger La Porte, a young man with whom Father Berrigan said he was slightly acquainted. To protest American involvement in Southeast Asia, Mr. La Porte set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in November 1965.
Soon, according to Father Berrigan, "the most atrocious rumors were linking his death to his friendship with me." He spoke at a service for Mr. La Porte, and soon thereafter the Jesuits, widely believed to have been pressured by Cardinal Spellman, sent him on a "fact finding" mission among poor workers in South America. An outcry from Catholic liberals brought him back after only three months, enough time for him to have been radicalized even further by the facts he had found.
For the Jesuits, Father Berrigan was both a magnet to bright young seminarians and a troublemaker who could not be kept in any one faculty job too long.
At one time or another he held faculty positions or ran programs at Union Seminary, Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia, Cornell and Yale. Eventually he settled into a long tenure at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx, where for a time he had the title of poet in residence.
Father Berrigan was released from the Danbury penitentiary in 1972; the Jesuits, alarmed at his failing health, managed to get him out early. He then resumed his travels.
After visiting the Middle East, he bluntly accused Israel of "militarism" and the "domestic repressions" of Palestinians. His remarks angered many American Jews. "Let us call this by its right name," wrote Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, himself a contentious figure among religious scholars: "old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism."
Nor was Father Berrigan universally admired by Catholics. Many faulted him for not singling out repressive Communist states in his diatribes against the world order, and later for not lending his voice to the outcry over sexual abuse by priests. There was also a sense that his notoriety was a distraction from the religious work that needed to be done.
Not the least of his long-running battles was with the church hierarchy. He was scathing about the shift to conservatism under Pope John Paul II and the "company men" he appointed to high positions.
Much of Father Berrigan's later work was concentrated on helping AIDS patients in New York City. In 2012, he appeared in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to support the Occupy Wall Street protest.
He also devoted himself to writing biblical studies. He felt a special affinity for the Hebrew prophets, especially Jeremiah, who was chosen by God to warn of impending disaster and commanded to keep at it, even though no one would listen for 40 years.
A brother, Jerry, died in July at 95, and another brother, Philip, died in 2002 at 79.
Father Berrigan seemed to reach a poet's awareness of his place in the scheme of things, and that of his brother Philip, who left the priesthood for a married life of service to the poor and spent a total of 11 years in prison for disturbing the peace in one way or another before his death. While they both still lived, Daniel Berrigan wrote:
My brother and I stand like the fences
of abandoned farms, changed times
too loosely webbed against
deicide homicide
A really powerful blow
would bring us down like scarecrows.
Nature, knowing this, finding us mildly useful
indulging also
her backhanded love of freakishness
allows us to stand.

[Peter Lemkin]

ALL of today's show on DN! is a tribute to Berrigan by others and in his own words. It reminded me of so many things, so many demonstrations, movements, actions, and times I'd heard him speak, etc. I'd urge all to watch the show here. I'll post the transcript as it is done...it takes some time.

Actor and activist Martin Sheen became close friends with Dan Berrigan. He played the trial judge in the film "In the King of Prussia," which chronicles how the Berrigan brothers and six others began the Plowshares Movement when they broke into the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, in 1980. In 1986, Martin Sheen was arrested along with Father Dan Berrigan in New York City. When he heard of Father Dan's passing, Martin Sheen reflected on his experience being arrested alongside the legendary priest, saying, "It was my first arrest for a noble cause, and it was the happiest day of my life."

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TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Martin Sheen became close friends with Father Dan Berrigan. On Sunday, after he learned of Dan Berrigan's death, he offered these thoughts on his passing.

MARTIN SHEEN: Before he went into prison for the Catonsville Nine action, he gave a series of talks. He wouldhe would surface. You know, he was underground, and he would surface every now and then. And he was holding a kind of a press conference with some peace people and reporters, and he was just about to be captured and sent away. And someone in the crowdhe was advocating that all of us should risk arrest and prison, if we really wanted to stop this war, because that's what the government was doing with young men's lives, so we had to step up. And someone in the audience said, "Well, fine, Father Berrigan. It's all well and good for you to advocate going to prison. You don't have any children. What about us? We have children. What's going to happen to our children if we go to prison?" And Dan said, "What's going to happen to them if you don't?" And that had a most profound effect on me. I thought, "Oh, my god, yes, we are called to nonviolent resistance, that is very costly. And if what we believe doesn't cost us something, then we're left to question its value."

And still I didn'tI didn't join Dan for a protest until 1986. I was in New York doing a film, and I had a day off. And so, I heard about a demonstration over at the 42nd Street, and trying to block the entrance to whereyou know, the McGraw-Hill Building, when they were planning basically to place nuclear weapons in outer space. This was the so-calledReagan's strategic plan, Star Wars. And I went to that demonstration, and Dan was there. And it was my first arrest for a noble cause, and it was the happiest day of my life, and I'll never forget. It was so disarming. Dan was, you know, kind of leading the group in prayer and singing. And the police finally arrived and said, "Now, come on, you guys. You've got two minutes to disperse." And Dan said to the presiding officer, "Come on, Officer, you believe in this cause. Get in here and join us." And he backed away and said, "Oh, no, no, Father, please, please, don't." He made it so human, so down to earth.

But the world has lost a great peacemaker and humanitarian and poet and such an inspiration and such ayou know, it's hard to describe the effect he's had without becomingI don't know what. It's like you're describing someone that could not possibly have lived, and yet we knew him and loved him and worked with him and celebrated with him. And in a few days, we're going to gather to celebrate his life and to send him on his way.

We spend the hour remembering the life and legacy of the legendary antiwar priest, Father Dan Berrigan. He died on Saturday, just short of his 95th birthday. Berrigan was a poet, pacifist, educator, social activist, playwright and lifelong resister to what he called "American military imperialism." Along with his late brother Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the antiwar and antidraft movement during the late 1960s, as well as the movement against nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s, he became the first Catholic priest to land on the FBI's most wanted list. Georgetown University theology professor Chester Gillis once said of Father Berrigan, quote, "If you were to identify Catholic prophets in the 20th century, he'd be right there with Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton."
In early 1968, Father Daniel Berrigan made international headlines when he traveled to North Vietnam with historian Howard Zinn to bring home three U.S. prisoners of war. In the documentary Holy Outlaw, Father Dan recalled spending time in Vietnamese shelters while being bombed by U.S. jets.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: So we were in this shelter and very unexpectedly came on three children, who were crouching in there, too, against all expectations, and one of the elder children feeding rice to one of the younger ones. And I wrote this little verse within a couple days and tried to read it later at our trial. It's called "Children in the Shelter."

Imagine; three of them.

As though survival
were a rat's word,
and a rat's death
waited there at the end

and I must have
in the century's boneyard
heft of flesh and bone in my arms

I picked up the littlest
a boy, his face
breaded with rice (his sister calmly feeding him
as we climbed down)

In my arms fathered
in a moment's grace, the messiah
of all my tears. I bore, reborn

a Hiroshima child from hell.

AMY GOODMAN: On May 17th, 1968, Father Dan Berrigan, his brother Phil and seven others took 378 draft files from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. Then, in the parking lot of the draft board office, the activists set the draft records on fire, using homemade napalm, to protest the Vietnam War. They became known as the Catonsville Nine. The act of civil disobedience was chronicled in the 2013 documentary Hit & Stay: A History of Faith and Resistance. This begins with Father Dan Berrigan.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We make our prayer in the name of that god whose name is peace and decency and unity and love. We unite in taking our matches, approaching the fire. We're all part of this.

GEORGE MISCHE: While people throughout the world, and especially Vietnam now, are suffering from napalm, that these files are also napalmed, to show that these lives can fall on the same fate as the Vietnamese.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Amen.

DAVID DARST: Napalm, which was made from information and from a formula in the United States Special Forces handbook published by the School of Special Warfare of the United States. We all had a hand in making the napalm that was used here today.

JIM HARNEY: Napalm is a very old weapon. It goes back to the Byzantines. But it really came to public attention during the war in Vietnam, in the pictures of napalmed people. So that was the kind of quintessential symbol of the war: We were burning babies, literally, in Vietnam. So that's why we wanted to come up with something symbolic and also something that would really destroy the files.

TOM MELVILLE: Our church has failed to act officially, and we feel that, as individuals, we're going to have to speak out in the name of Catholicism and Christianity. And we hope our action to inspire other people who have Christian principles or a faith similar to Christianity will act accordingly, too, to stop the terrible destruction that America is wreaking on the whole world.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We regret very much, I think all of us, the inconvenience and even the suffering that we've brought to these clerks here.

FATHER PHIL BERRIGAN: We sincerely hope we didn't injure anyone.

PRIESTS: Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as peace criminals by war criminals.

AMY GOODMAN: Father Berrigan and other members of the Catonsville Nine were arrested on the spot. The draft board raid invigorated the antiwar movement by inspiring over a hundred similar acts of protest. It also shook the foundation of the tradition-bound Catholic Church. In 1970, Father Dan Berrigan spent four months living underground as a fugitive from the FBI while his conviction was under appeal.

INTERVIEWER: During the time he was in hiding, Father Berrigan changed his location often. He stayed with 37 different families in 10 Eastern and Midwestern cities. Well, Father Dan, you've been underground for some time now. What's it like to be underground in the United States of America?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, I'd say that it looks as though it could go on forever. It looks good enough, looks useful enough, for the movement.

LIZ McALISTER: So there were some, what, four months that they looked for Dan, everywhere. And he was everywhere and available to everyone, except the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Liz McAlister, Phil Berrigan's wife, in the film Hit & Stay. In 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six others began the Plowshares Movement when they broke into General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The activists hammered nuclearon the nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files. They were arrested and charged with over 10 different felony and misdemeanor counts. They became know as the Plowshares Eight. And I want to turn now to a clip from the film In the King of Prussia. This scene features Dan Berrigan reciting what he told the judge and jury during the trial.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: You've heard about hammers and blood in this room. These are the hammers of hell. These are the hammers that will break the world to bits. These are the hammers that claim the end of the world. The judge knows it. The prosecutor knows it. We've seen people walk away from these things. We've seen them disclaim them. We've seen them say they are not responsible for them. We've seen all sorts of language circling them like a dance of death. They are murder. He knows it. He knows it. You must know it. We have been tryingwe eightto take responsibility for these things, to call them by their right name, which is murder, death, genocide, the end of the world. Their proper use is known to the judge and the prosecutor and to you. ...

We would like you to know the name of our crime. We would like to assume responsibility for a world, for children, for the future. And if that is a crime, then it is quite clear that we belong in their jails. Where they belong is something else. But in the name of all the eight, I would like to leave with you, friends and jurors, that great and noble word, which is our crime: "responsibility."

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: An anniversary like this inducesseems to me, induces silence rather than a lot of words, but I'll try. A few minutes after this horrid event a year ago, the phone rang. I was working at something. And a friend from North Carolina said, "Something terrible is happening in New York City." And I said, "What?" and so on and so forth. And my first reaction was, I guess, right out of the gut rather than the heart, and I blurted into the phone, "So it's come home at last." Sympathy and tears came later, but that was the beginning. And I had a sense that that came from a very deep immersion in what I might call a hyphenated reality of America-in-the-world, hyphen in-the-world.

I was under American bombs in Hanoi in '68. We spent almost every night, Howard Zinn and myself, in bomb shelters. It was quite an educated moment to cower under the bombs of your own country. There was a period of very intense reflection after thatthat would be in February. Three months later, with my brother and seven others, I went to Catonsville, Maryland, and burned the draft files. I had seen what napalm did to children and the aged and anybody within the swath of fire in Hanoi. I had seen what happened to Jesuit priests who get in the way of America in Salvador. In '84, I met with the Jesuits who were later murdered at the university there. I had tasted American courts and American prisons. I'm trying to explain my first reaction: So it's come home at last.

Within a week or so, I opened the Hebrew Bible to the book called The Lamentations of Jeremiah. And I found there a very powerful antidote to the poison that was running deep in the veins of authority here. Evidently, this bystander of the destruction of the holy city was giving us permission to go through an enormously redemptive and healing labyrinth of emotions, emotions that one would think superficially the Bible would not allow for. But he allows the bystanders and the survivors to speak of enormous hatred of God, a spirit of revenge against the enemy, a guilt in view of one's own crimes and inhumanity, a hatred of those who have wrought this upon us, etc., etc. These are all the tunnel, the very deep tunnel, of psychology and spirit that the Bible opens before us. I began to understand that unless we went through that, we would never come out to the light again, and that that would be true of myself, as well. I began to understand that the foreshortening of that lonely and difficult emotional trek was a clue to Mr. Bush and the war spirit, and that unless one were allowed the full gamut of human and inhuman emotions, one would come out armed and ready with another tat for tit.

AMY GOODMAN: Father Dan Berrigan, speaking on Democracy Now! on the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that first decision you made in Catonsville, before Catonsville, to do it, what you were doing at the time, and how you made the decision?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yeah. I was teaching at Cornell, and Philip came up. He was awaiting sentencing for a prior action in '67 in Baltimore, where they poured their blood on draft files in the city. And he came up to Cornell and announced to me, very coolly, that he and others were going to do it again. I was blown away by the courage, and the effrontery, really, of my brother, in not really just submitting to the prior conviction, but saying, "We've got to underscore the first action with another one." And he says, "You're invited." So I swallowed hard and said, "Give me a few days. I want to talk about pro and cons of doing a thing like this." And so, when I started meditating and putting down reasons to do it and reasons not to do it, it became quite clear that the option and the invitation were outweighing everything else and that I had to go ahead with him. So I notified him that I was in. And we did it.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, this was after you had been to North Vietnam.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Right. This was May of '68, and I had been in Hanoi in late January, early February of that year.

AMY GOODMAN: With historian Howard Zinn.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Freeing prisoners of war?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yes, we brought home three flyers who had been captured and imprisoned. It was a kind of gesture of peace in the midst of the war by the Vietnamese, during so the-called Tet holiday, which was traditionally a time of reunion of families, and so they wanted these flyers to be reunited with their families.

AMY GOODMAN: In Catonsville, was this the first time you were breaking the laws of the United States?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No, I had been at the Pentagon in '67 inI think it was in October. And a great number of us were arrested after a warning from McNamara to disperse. And we spent a couple of weeks in jail. It was rather rough. And we did a fast. And we were in the D.C. jail, which was a very mixed lot. So I had had a little bit of a taste during that prior year.

AMY GOODMAN: You and your brother, Phil Berrigan, had an unusual relationship with Secretary of Defense McNamara. You actually talked to him, wrote to him, met him?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yes. I met him at a social evening with the Kennedys in about '65 and after this very posh dinner, which was welcoming me home from Latin America. One of the Kennedys announced that they would love to have a discussion between the secretary of war and myself in front of everybody, which we did start. And they asked me to initiate the thing, and I said to the secretary something about, "Since you didn't stop the war this morning, I wonder if you'd do it this evening." So he looked kind of past my left ear and said, "Well, I'll just say this to Father Berrigan and everybody: Vietnam is like Mississippi. If they won't obey the law, you send the troops in." And he stopped. And the next morning, when I returned to New York City, I said to a secretary at a magazine we were publishingI said, "Would you please take this down in shorthand? Because in two weeks I won't believe that I heard what I heard. The secretary said, in response to my request to stop the war, quote, 'Vietnam is like Mississippi: If they won't obey the law, you send the troops in.'" And this was supposed to be the brightest of the bright, one of the whiz kids, respected by all in the Cabinet, etc., etc., etc. And he talks like a sheriff out of Selma, Alabama. Whose law? Won't obey whose law? Well, that was the level at which the war was being fought.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Dan, after the trial, you went underground. Why did you decide to do that?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, the war had worsened, and the spring of '70, the campuses were aflame. Nixon had invaded Laos. There was secret bombing going on. The war had widened. It was a bad time to turn oneself in, and we were comparing that order to military induction. It was like saying, "Well, I'm going off to war. I'm going to obey them and go off to war. I'm going to take the penalty for what we did to make the war evidently, evidently unwinnable and unwageable. So, a group of us said, "No go," and went underground.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean when you go underground?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, it meant that the FBI was on your tail and that Hoover was outraged and very angry and kept marking up sheetsthat we got out, Freedom of Information, latersaying, "Get him! Get him!" and scrawling all these orders around and putting extra people on our tail.

AMY GOODMAN: But you were showing up in the strangest places.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: All sorts of places, including preaching in church and getting on national television with a good interview and so on and so forth. So, it really increased the edginess of the whole thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what happenedwas it at Cornell? They almost caught you there?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: That was at the beginning of all this. In early spring of '70, they had a big rally in our favor at Cornell. And I showed up unexpectedly and got away again, in spite of the presence of FBI all over.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you get out?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: I went out in a puppet of one of the 12 apostles. They had had a beautiful mime onstage that night showing the Last Supper. And somebody whispered in the darkness, "Wouldn't you like to go out?" And I said, "Well, let's try it."

AMY GOODMAN: So you went out as one of the apostles.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yes. Well

AMY GOODMAN: And you slipped past the FBI.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Got away, from months.

AMY GOODMAN: How did they catch you?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: There were letters exchanged between Philip in prison and Elizabeth.

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Berrigan, your brother.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And Elizabeth McAlister.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: His fiancée or wife at that point. And they gave a kind of a hint as to the fact that I would be visiting friends on Block Island, which proved true, so we had birdwatchers out there, and they got me.

AMY GOODMAN: There was that famous picture of you with a peace sign and the

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: authorities on either elbow

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: taking you in. And how long did you serve then?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: I think that was two years then.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, with your brother Phil, you founded the Plowshares Movement, your first action in 1980?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: '80.

AMY GOODMAN: King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you did at the GE plant.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, we had had meetings, I recall, all that spring and autumn with people about the production of an entirely new weapon, the Mark 12A, which was really only useful if it initiated a nuclear war. It was a first-strike nuclear weapon and was being fabricated in this anonymous plant, huge, huge factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. And there had never been an attempt in the history of the antinuclear movementthere had never been an attempt to interfere with the production of a new weapon. And with the help of Daniel Ellsberg and other experts, we were able to understand that this was not a Hiroshima-type bomb. It was something totally different. It was opening a new chapter in this chamber of horrors. So, we decided we will go in there in September of '70 [sic]. And we did.

AMY GOODMAN: September of '80?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: '80, excuse me.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean, you did?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, we didn't know exactly where in that huge factory these weapons were concealed, but we had to trust in providence that we would come upon the weaponry, which we did in short order. We went in with the workers at the changing of the shift and found there was really no security worth talking about, a very easy entrance. In about three minutes, we were looking at doomsday. The weapon was before us. It was an unarmed warhead about to be shipped to Amarillo, Texas, for its payload. So it was a harmless weapon as of that moment. And we cracked the weapon. It was very fragile. It was made to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere from outer space, so it was like eggshell, really. And we had taken as our model the great statement of Isaiah 2: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares." So we did it, poured our blood around it and stood in a circle, I think, reciting the Lord's Prayer until Armageddon arrived, as we expected.

AMY GOODMAN: You've continued to get arrested. Do you think these arrests, what you have engaged in, protest, even when people are not being arrested or jailed, have an effect? I mean, you have gone through a number of wars now. Do you think things are getting better, or do you think they're getting worse?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No. No. This is the worst time of my long life, really. I've never seen such a base and cowardly violation of any kind of human bond that I can respect. These people appear on television, and the unwritten, unspoken motto seems to be something about "We despise you. We despise your law. We despise your order. We despise your Bible. We despise your conscience. And if necessary, we will kill you to say so." I've never really felt that deep contempt before for any kind of canon or tradition of the human.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "We despise your Bible"? It is often said it's done in the name of the Bible.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, yes, these people arethey're making a scrapbook out of the Bible in their own favor. And they're omitting all the passages that have to do with compassion and love of others, especially love of enemies, or the injunction to Peter, "Put up your sword. Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword"all of that. All of that gets cut out in favor of, well, a god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate.


I want to begin with Frida. Your uncle passed this weekend. You saw him the day before he died. Our condolences to you and your whole family. Can you share your thoughts with us today, Frida?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Well, Amy, the first thing I want to say is thank you. You and Democracy Now! have givengiven him back to us. To see his face, to hear his voice is an extraordinary gift. And I am so grateful. My family is so grateful. And so, to just be sitting here with his extraordinary legacy is overwhelming. So thank you.
I saw Dan on Friday, went to Murray Weigel in the Bronx, where he has been for a number of years. He was very weak. He was very frail. I sat with him for about two hours, and not knowing what else to do, I read to him from his autobiography, which was kind of hilarious, because he is sohe is so profound. His words are so profound. His vocabulary is beyond. And so, I faltered often, readingreading to him. But we read about healing. We read about some of his favorite people. We read about his experiences as a young Jesuit. And I kissed him, and I said goodbye. And I said, "I'll see you soon. I'll see you on Sunday. I'll come back."
And then I was with my family, with my brother Jerry, my sister Kate, and our mother, Liz McAlister. Just we, by happenstance, happened to be gathering as a family on Friday night and Saturday, when we received word from close friends, who were gathered around Dan's bed, that he wasthat he was failing and that his breathing was labored. And we came. And we arrivedwe were crossing the George Washington Bridge, that infernal bridge, when we received word that Dan had taken his last breath. And then we were able to be together and be with him for the rest of Saturday, to be with his body, to be with his spirit. And there aren'tthere aren't words, except such gratitude for his life and for how special he was to each of us. And so
AMY GOODMAN: I remember seeing you, Frida, many years ago, covering you being arrested at the Los Alamos nuclear lab, as well as Martin Sheen, who we heard from earlier in this broadcast. And as Martin Sheen crossed the line at the lab, about to get arrested protesting nuclear weapons, he said, "I work for GE to make a living." General Electric owned NBC. He said, "I work for GE to make a living. I do this to stay alive." And then you walked across the line, and you put up your arm. You were holding flowers. The influence of your uncle, Father Dan, not to mention your own father, Phil Berrigan, on your own life and your own activism?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Well, I think they and my mother and the extraordinary community, the peace community, the Catholic Worker community, gave me a sense that anything is possible and that if we act in conscience, if we act together, if we are moved, we can accomplish extraordinary things and speakspeak with power and conviction against the powers that be, and that half of it is about showing up, you know, just beingbeing in the streets, being with one another, beingit's aboutit's about showing up. And Dan Berrigan showed up. He was there. You know, all of the pictures that you're showing, so many of them are in the streets. They're holding signs. They're in the bitter cold. They're in extraordinary heat. And it's about standing up and showing up. And so, so he taught us that.
I think he also taught us that we do all of that with a spirit of joy and withoutas much as we can, without ego and attachment to the outcome, that we can't control most of it, right? We don't set the policy. We don't write the laws. We don't control how the media sees us or how other people see us. We can only really control ourselves. And we go in a spirit of joy. We go in a spirit of surrender. We go holding the hands of those closest to us. So he taught me that.
And then he also taught me, taught my family, how tohow to step back, how to appreciate life, how to appreciate beauty. His world was always filled with such beauty. The walls of his apartment were crammed with beautiful works of art. He appreciated a delicious meal. He loved a drink and the kind of late-night joking and telling stories that can happen after somebody's had a drink or two or three. And so, his apartment, in his presence, is where I saw my parents, Phil and Liz, these serious, intense, heavy peopleis where I saw them lay it all down and take it all off for a minute and just enjoy being together, enjoy one another. And that was a significant gift in our lives.

[Magda Hassan]

Very sad. But one of the few good ones to make it to an nice old age. A life well lived in service to others and peace.

[Albert Doyle]

Who were the sponsors?


The guys Berrigan was fighting...

[Tracy Riddle]

[Peter Lemkin]

https://www.worldcat.org/title/to-dwell-...9/viewport

[Peter Lemkin]

This is Part 2 of our discussion, following our global broadcast, with three guests remembering his life and legacy.
In New York, we're joined by Frida Berrigan. She's the niece of Dan Berrigan. She's the daughter of Father Dan Berrigan's brother, Phil Berrigan, she herself a longtime peace activist, very much following in the tradition of her family, of her father, Phil Berrigan, her uncle, Dan Berrigan, and her mother, Liz McAlister. Frida writes a regular column for Waging Nonviolence.
Also in New York, Father John Dear, a Catholic priest, longtime peace activist, one of Dan Berrigan's closest friends, worked with him for 35 years. He's Father Dan's literary executor and the editor of five books of his writings.
We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana, and joined in the studios of public television station WLAE by Bill Quigley, professor and director of the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice, and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University, one of Dan Berrigan's attorneys.
We welcome you all back to Democracy Now! Now, we ended with you, Bill, telling us about an action that you represented Father Dan over. But I was wondering if you could elaborate a little more that, now that we have more time. Explain exactly when it was, back in 1989, and what Father Dan did, the circumstances, what he was protesting and what he did.
BILL QUIGLEY: Well, Father Dan was, at that time, teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. And the Jesuits, as talked about, were assassinated at the university in Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: These were the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.
BILL QUIGLEY: Correct. And there was a nationwide call for civil disobedience to resist U.S. policy in El Salvador. And I was called to a meeting at Loyola by a group of people who were going to engage in civil disobedience, they said. And I've been to many meetings like that over the years. And there in the group was Dan Berrigan, and I realized, because he was there, that this was a very serious group. He didn't try to be the leader. He didn't try to be outspoken or anything. He was quiet and a presence there as the group decided what they were going to do. And they decided they were going to go to downtown New Orleans into the Federal Building and block all of the elevators in the Federal Building so that business could not continue as usual on a Friday afternoon. He, along with other Jesuit priests, some students, some other antiwar activists in the community, sat in these elevators and just peacefully prayed and sang and stopped all the business in the Federal Building for some time.
The interesting thing was that the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney, was a Jesuit-trained lawyer. And he came blowing into the room, into the lobby of the place, and said, "Look, I wasI went to Jesuit high school. I went to Jesuit university. I went to Jesuit law school. I respect the Jesuits, but you have to follow authority. You have to follow the law. Obedience is one of the things that you have to do as a Jesuit." And he was preaching to the Jesuits to follow his orders. And they said, "Well, no, we're not going to do that." And he said, "Well, I'm going to call your provincial and tell your provincial to order you out of these things." He said, "I don't want to arrest you. You've made your point. I don't want to arrest you." And they said, "Well, you don't have to call our provincial. Our provincial is right over here." He was one of the
AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the provincialwhat the provincial is.
BILL QUIGLEY: The provincial is like the local leader of the Jesuits. So they werehe was going to call their boss, who was going to tell them to get out of the elevators and stop the civil disobedience. Well, the provincial, the boss, was there, and he was there in support of the activities that they took. And so the prosecutor threw up his hands, arrested everybody. They were processed and the like. And then, the semester ended not long after. And it came time for the trial, and Dan Berrigan said, "I'm not coming back for the trial. It's ridiculous to come all the way back from New York just for a trial for, you know, this sort of thing, compared to what the government did." And so he didn't come. He wrote a nice letter to the judge just saying, "I'm not coming, I just want to let you know." And a couple weeks later, he was arrested in New York City. I received a call from Ramsey Clark, who
AMY GOODMAN: The former U.S. attorney general.
BILL QUIGLEY: The former U.S. attorney general, who represented him on many things. I'm one of dozens, if not hundreds, of lawyers for Daniel Berrigan, because of his activities over the years. And he had been arrested and kept in jail in New York, because he had skipped the trial in New Orleans. He agreed to come back. Somebody posted a bond for him. He came back a few weeks later to face this horrifying contempt of court charge for, you know, skipping out on court and the big threats of going to jail. And, of course, he was not intimidated whatsoever by going to jail. He took the courts very gently. You know, they had a job to do. Do whatever you want to do; we'll do whatever we have to do.
And so, when he came to court, people were afraid that he was going to be kept in jail in New Orleans for a while. So, his good friend, the president of the United States on our TV show, Martin Sheen, came down as a character witness for him. And the two of them, when they came into the courthouse, essentially, shut down the entire courthouse, because everybody wanted to see Martin Sheen and Daniel Berrigan. So all the other courts closed, a lot of the Federal Building. People streamed in to see him. And they were charming, and they were light, and they were laughing. And they told how serious it was and what they had done and the like. And the judge ultimately gave him some community service hours that he had to follow through on, which, of course, his life was made up of community service. But he was a very quiet but forceful leader with people. He would speak when asked to, and when he did speak, he was powerful. But he didn't go out of his way to make a lot of speeches.
AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted you to elaborate on Dan's response to you when you interviewed him on stage, when you said to him, you know, "You're considered a hero by so many."
BILL QUIGLEY: Right. Well, actually, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, I think, considered him a hero. And so I asked him on the stage, and we had not rehearsed, so I didn't know what the answer was. And I asked him, you know, "Who are your heroes? Because you're a hero to so many." And he said, "Bill," he said, "I don't believe in heroes. I believe in community. And it is in community, it is in movements, it is in people gathering together, that courage is displayed, that inspiration happens, that sacrifice happens and the like." And we have seen, and celebrate, even after his death now, the hundreds of activities and communities across not just the United States, but Europe and around the world, who have adopted many of the activities and the actions that he has done, the Plowshares Movement. There is a young woman in Omaha this month who is going to trialI'm representing her, standby counselJessica Reznicek, who broke out the windows of Northrop Grumman inoutside a Air Force base there and to resist the next generation of weapons of mass destruction that they are making so much money off of. The Sister Megan Rice, who's been on your show before, Michael[Greg] Boertje-Obed, John Dear, Fridathere's just hundreds and hundreds of people and hundreds and hundreds of actions of this community of peacemakers. And that is really, I think, his legacy to us, as a prophet, as a truth teller, but also as a community builder and inspirer and as an activist himself.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to actor Martin Sheen, who played Father Dan Berrigan [sic] in the 1982 film [In] the King of Prussia, which tells the story of how Berrigan and others became active in the nuclear weaponsthe antinuclear weapons movement.

MARTIN SHEEN: Before he went into prison for the Catonsville Nine action, he gave a series of talks. He wouldhe would surface. You know, he was underground, and he would surface every now and then. And he was holding a kind of a press conference with some peace people and reporters, and he was just about to be captured and sent away. And someone in the crowdhe was advocating that all of us should risk arrest and prison, if we really wanted to stop this war, because that's what the government was doing with young men's lives, so we had to step up. And someone in the audience said, "Well, fine, Father Berrigan. It's all well and good for you to advocate going to prison. You don't have any children. What about us? We have children. What's going to happen to our children if we go to prison?" And Dan said, "What's going to happen to them if you don't?" And that had a most profound effect on me. I thought, "Oh, my god, yes, we are called to nonviolent resistance, that is very costly. And if what we believe doesn't cost us something, then we're left to question its value."

And still I didn'tI didn't join Dan for a protest until 1986. I was in New York doing a film, and I had a day off. And so, I heard about a demonstration over at the 42nd Street, and trying to block the entrance to whereyou know, the McGraw-Hill Building, when they were planning basically to place nuclear weapons in outer space. This was the so-calledReagan's strategic plan, Star Wars. And I went to that demonstration, and Dan was there. And it was my first arrest for a noble cause, and it was the happiest day of my life, and I'll never forget. It was so disarming. Dan was, you know, kind of leading the group in prayer and singing. And the police finally arrived and said, "Now, come on, you guys. You've got two minutes to disperse." And Dan said to the presiding officer, "Come on, Officer, you believe in this cause. Get in here and join us." And he backed away and said, "Oh, no, no, Father, please, please, don't." He made it so human, so down to earth.

But the world has lost a great peacemaker and humanitarian and poet and such an inspiration and such ayou know, it's hard to describe the effect he's had without becomingI don't know what. It's like you're describing someone that could not possibly have lived, and yet we knew him and loved him and worked with him and celebrated with him. And in a few days, we're going to gather to celebrate his life and to send him on his way.

AMY GOODMAN: The action you're talking about, Bill, that Father Dan was involved with, was protesting the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. Why was he occupying the Federal Building here in New Orleans? What did the U.S. government have to do with it?
BILL QUIGLEY: So, thehe was, as so many werefelt terribly bad about the murder of these folks. But the problem was that they were really murdered by the United States government, not directly, but indirectly. The people who threatened the Jesuits, who had threatened and murdered and assassinated people all over Latin America and South America, had been trained by the U.S. Army School of Americas, which was originally in Panama, has since been moved to Fort Benning and renamed other times, but it was United States policy that pushed, funded, trained and activated the people who killed these Jesuits, their housekeeper, other sisters, other peasants, other activists, labor organizers and the like.
So, it was an act of remembering their sorrow, but also an act of resistance and challenge to the United States government, which, aswhich Dan Berrigan would always remind us that Martin Luther King said the United States is the world's greatest purveyor of violence. So it was to fight against our government and say, "No more, not in our name, " again and again. It wasn't the first time. So it was the essence of the fight in Central America that he was involved with, obviously in Vietnam, obviously Iraqall over the world. And so, it was to try to hold our government accountable, try to witness and say, "Not in our name will we allow this to happen."
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back then, from 1989 to 1968, to the Catonsville action, when he and eight others, Father Dan, as well as his brother, Phil Berrigan, and other peace activists burned the A1 draft files, over 300 of them, in Catonsville, Maryland, using homemade napalm. The statement that Father Dan Berrigan wrote famously said, "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children." Frida Berrigan, if you can talk about, well, the beginning of the whole Plowshares Movement, what your father, Phil Berrigan, and Dan Berriganhow they decided to engage in this kind of direct action, that would carry on for decades and carry oncarries on, you know, beyond the lives of both Phil and Dan Berrigan now?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Well, I think the key word here for the Plowshares Movement is "responsibility." My father, my mother, Uncle Dan, the Plowshares community took nuclear weapons personally. They felt personallyfeel personally responsible for the fact that the United States holds the wherewithal to destroy our entire planet hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times over, and that we threaten on a daily basisthat the United States threatens on a daily basis the world, the whole world, with a nuclear winter. So, as Christians, as peacemakers, as people of conscience, they said, "We are responsible for these weapons. And our faith calls us to disarm them, to transform them." And so, in order to do that, there's walking through fences, there's going over sensors, there's breaking into buildings, and there's a taking responsibility for these weapons. So that was a real thread throughout our whole lives, is we are responsible. We can't just say, "Oh, well, the people in Washington have that under control." We are responsible.
And so, my father, Uncle Dan, my mother, so many others risked long times in jail, riskedrisked everything, risked being away frombeing away from us. Who would want to be away from me as a small child, right? And soand then that idea really took off. There have been hundreds of Plowshares actions. Thereperhaps there are Plowshares actions being planned and conceived of right now, where people of conscience feel this call out of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament prophets, Micah and Isaiah, to beat swords into plowshares, to turn spears into pruning hooks, to make weapons into implements of life. So, it was such asuch a courageous idea to be grippedto take something off a page and to put it into life. To take something written 2,000 years ago and say, "This isthis is what I need to do," is such asuch a profound and just out-there thing to do, and yet it has gripped so many people. And it certainly set up our lives, as the children of Phil and Liz, the nieces and nephews of Dan Berrigan. It set up our lives, where many family reunions were held outside of courthouses and in prison visiting rooms throughout ourthroughout our lives. And the function of poetry and prophecy in our lives has just beenwell, it's been strange. You know, it's been strange, but it has been magical, too. And soand I think that the reverberations of these witnesses are things that, you know, will live on in the world for generations to come. And I take great comfortI take great comfort in that.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2006, the late author Kurt Vonnegut spoke at the celebration of Father Dan's 85th birthday in New York.

KURT VONNEGUT: Dear Father Berrigan, Dear Daniel, Dear Dan, we love you. This is such a happy occasion for us, because you are still among us, being what you are, doing what you do. They say now that you are 85 years old, but a large part of you is now 2006 years old. And we wish that part of you another thousand years as a presence here on Earth, if we have that long. Dear Father Berrigan, Dear Daniel, Dear Dan, we love you.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Kurt Vonnegut, speaking at the 85th birthday party of Father Dan Berrigan. And this is the historian Howard Zinn, the late, great historian, who wrote A People's History of the United States, also speaking at that same event in 2006 marking Father Dan Berrigan's 85th birthday.

HOWARD ZINN: I met Dan in early 1968 for the first time. We met in an apartment in Greenwich Village, and in a few hours we were on our way to North Vietnam, traveling halfway around the world. And although we had never seen one another until that day, we were going to spend the next three weeks or so very closely together. We were there to bring back these three first flyers released by North Vietnam. And let me say that meeting Dan Berrigan has been one of the most important moments of my life, really. And, really, everyevery day that we were in Hanoiwe were there for about a week, and every day that we were in Hanoi, we had a very, very full day. And it was a busy time. And then, at the end of the daywe both had our little hotel rooms in this old French hotel. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, Dan would come to my room. And he traveled with a very tinyI wouldn't call it a suitcase. Something very small. Andbut it'sbut he pulled out of it every night a little bottle of cognac. And I had a feeling that there wasn't much else in this bag. And so, we would have a little bit of cognac, and then we would both retire. And the next morning, we would meet at breakfast, and Dan would have a poem. I didn't know when he wrote it. I supposed it was while he slept. But every morning, another poem.

And that was the beginning of my friendship with Dan, which would continue. He introduced me to thewhat can I call it? The Catholic left? Dare I use the word "left"? The Catholic antiwar movement, to Phil and Liz and Tom and all the others. You know, what a remarkable group. And then, of course, Dan and I, we became entangled with one another in a number of ways through the course of the movement against the war in Vietnam, a period when he came to Boston and was underground, and I was, as the FBI would say, his handler. Andbut I can actually never handle him. You know, and Ithere were all those things he did afterward, which you know about, from the Catonsville Nine through all the others.

And at one point, he sent me and my wife Roshe sent us a poem, which he had written in memory of Mitch Snyder, who was an advocate for the homeless in Washington, D.C., and who hadwho hadwho had just at a certain point found things too much for him and killed himself. And Dan wrote this poem in his honor. And you've actually heard some of those lines tonight from the Witness Against Torture people, but I want to read you the whole poem, because I brought it with me to read. And...

In loving memoryMitchell Snyder

Some stood up once and sat down,
Some walked a mile and walked away.
Some stood up twice then sat down,
I've had it, they said.

Some walked two miles, then walked away,
It's too much, they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood.
they were taken for fools
they were taken for being taken in.

Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth
they walked the waters
they walked the air.

Why do you stand?
they were asked, and
why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said, and
because of the heart, and
because of the bread.

Because
the cause
is the heart's beat
and the children born
and the risen bread.

Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the late, great Howard Zinn, talking directly to Father Dan Berrigan, celebrating his 85th birthday. John Dear, if you can go through what in the beginning inspired Dan? I mean, you have Phil Berrigan and Dan Berrigan. Phil, I think, engaged in these actions a little earlier, maybe encouraged his brother to do the same. But talk about when Father Dan decided that this is the course of action he would take in his life.
FATHER JOHN DEAR: Thank you, Amy. You know, we're talking about Dan as this great resister. But, you know, he was famous in the early '60s as a poet, so he was ahe was actually a great literary person, as well, I think one of the great poets of the time. And he was also a very serious religious leader as a Catholic priest. And so, Dan entered the Jesuits in 1939. He and his family were very much pro-war. In the '50s, Dan is very involved in the church and is a teacher. What happenedand I pressed Phil on this, and Dan lateris that the FOR reached out to him around 1960, and to Thomas Merton and to Thich Nhat Hanh, and got them really involvedthe Fellowship of Reconciliationin beginning to speak out against war and nuclear weapons. And then they went through this transformation, with Thomas Merton, kind of under the guide of Dorothy Day, Dan's great friend, and she was really Dan's leader, if you will. And Dan was in Europe in 1964.
AMY GOODMAN: Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.
FATHER JOHN DEAR: Right, with the Catholic
AMY GOODMAN: And explain who Thomas Merton is.
FATHER JOHN DEAR: Thomas Merton was one of the famousmost famous figures in Catholic Church history, a famous monk, who wrote hundreds of books, actually. But in 1960this never happened beforehe began writing against racism and against war and on nuclear weapons. We had never had this before. Literally, in the United States, no one had ever done that, except Dorothy Day. And to get such a prominent person, who was really Dan's best friend, Thomas Merton, with Dorothy Day, then Phil, saying, "Wait a second. To be a religious person is to serve the god of peace. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus, who's, like Gandhi, a hero of nonviolence." But this has never been thought of like that before. But what was so bold was, they decided to do it, and then they did it. By '64, '65, Merton led a famous retreat for Dan and Phil. And then they got really involved. Dan was kicked out of the country for beginning to speak against the war. Then
AMY GOODMAN: Kicked out of the country by?
FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, these are great questions. For years, we thought it was the cardinal of New York, who was a very famous pro-war leader, Cardinal Spellman. He used to go to Vietnam and literally bless the troops. Dan always thought it was him, but research was done, and we discovered about 10 years ago it was secretly the Jesuits themselves. Cardinal Spellman didn't do that. They kicked him out of the country to try to stop him from speaking out against war.
But there was such an outcry. Friends took out a full-page ad in The New York Times. Dan came back. And then he got invited with the Cornell students to go to the big mobilization at the Pentagon. We're talking now October 1967, a week before Phil's Baltimore Four action. Dan didn't plan to get arrested. All his student friends got arrested, so he got arrested, and the first priest to do so. And then Phil did the action. And then, suddenly the invitation happened for him and Howard Zinn to go to Vietnam. We're now talking January 1968. If you study the correspondence with Merton and Phil, none of this was planned out. It was unfolding as the war was getting worse. They are now prominent people, but they're saying, "OK, students are speaking and marching, and young people are marching against the war. The war is clearly getting worse. The election is going to happen." Bobby Kennedy hadn't gotso forth and so on. "What are we going to do?" And being in Vietnam changed Dan's life. And then the death of Martin Luther King kind of led Phil and Dan to take another step.
And, Amy, you know, listening to that quote, it's so hard and shocking to really imagine what they did, but when Dan said, "Our apologies," "We apologize," Sorry, dear friends, we can only burn paper instead of children," you know, the whole country freaked out that priests were breaking the law in opposition to the war. But very few were quite upset, you know, about the bombing and dropping of napalm upon millions of people in Vietnam. And theythe symbolic action of pouring napalm on draft files, leading to 300 other draft board raidsending the draftwe know historically it ended the draft. It changed the Catholic Church, and it inspired tens of millions of people to take to the streets. I would say that very seriously, having really studied it and talked at length with Dan and Phil about that.
And then you'd say, after prison, which was so horribleDan almost died in prisonwell, they could rest on their laurels and be great heroes of the peace movement. Not at all. They kept going, addressed nuclear weapons. Phil founded Jonah House, and then they did the Plowshares Eightat great cost. Dan's health has never been that great. He faced a good 10 years in prison. He eventually did not go to prison for that. But they kept at it.
And Dan always continued his love of language. So powerful. That's why he's so interesting to listen to. And he was a great spiritual giant, certainly on the level of Dr. King and Gandhi, butand Dorothy Day, his friend, but also his other friends, Thomas Merton; Rabbi Abraham Heschel, close friend of Dan's; our friend Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist leader, who's near death himself. They had a big celebration of Dan yesterday in Plum Village in France, and I've been in contact with him. So, Dan, as a religious figure, saying if you're going to pursue the spiritual life, you have to work to end the killing of sisters and brothers around the planet, this is a great gift Dan has given all of us and a great hope and a symbol. And what a blessing, Amy, for all of us to have known him.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with two separate comments. This is from filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, who recorded a statement remembering Father Dan Berrigan.

MICHAEL MOORE: I was deeply saddened this weekend to learn the news of the passing of Father Daniel Berrigan. But truth be told, I have, throughout my life, been overjoyed at the fact that both he and his brother, Philip Berrigan, were perhaps the main inspiration to me as a child, as an adolescent, a young 13-year-old back in Catholic grade school myself in Michigan, and being inspired by them in what they were doing to try and stop the Vietnam War. And I made a decision that basically I wanted to be them. I was not your typical 13- or 14-year-old. But in many ways I was. But one thing I knew for certain is that I wanted to do what they were doing. And I have to say that what I have been able to do throughout my life, I can draw a direct line back to following them, following their example, reading what they wrote, listening to what they had to say. And I've been asked many times in the past in terms of, you know, who inspired me or whoyou know, who was a mentor to me or whatever, and if I had any heroes as a teenager, Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan were at the top of the list. I'm sad to see him go, but I am so glad that he was part of my life, of our lives, of this country's life, of this world.

And I guess I'm optimistic knowing that there are so many millions of others just like him, maybe not as famous, but I know some of them are listening to this right now, some of you, who are, in your own ways, in your own communities, doing the things that need to be done, fighting the good fight, continuing the struggle, and doing it with love and kindness and a sense of what's right and wrong and fair and just. And if we all keep doing that, then that means Daniel Berrigan lives on.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Michael Moore. And I want to end with Father Dan Berrigan in his own words, in our firehouse studio in 2002, reading a poem about his brother, Phil Berrigan.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: An anniversary like this inducesseems to me, induces silence rather than a lot of words, but I'll try. A few minutes after this horrid event a year ago, the phone rang. I was working at something. And a friend from North Carolina said, "Something terrible is happening in New York City." And I said, "What?" and so on and so forth. And my first reaction was, I guess, right out of the gut rather than the heart, and I blurted into the phone, "So it's come home at last." Sympathy and tears came later, but that was the beginning. And I had a sense that that came from a very deep immersion in what I might call a hyphenated reality of America-in-the-world, hyphen in-the-world.

I was under American bombs in Hanoi in '68. We spent almost every night, Howard Zinn and myself, in bomb shelters. It was quite an educated moment to cower under the bombs of your own country. There was a period of very intense reflection after thatthat would be in February. Three months later, with my brother and seven others, I went to Catonsville, Maryland, and burned the draft files. I had seen what napalm did to children and the aged and anybody within the swath of fire in Hanoi. I had seen what happened to Jesuit priests who get in the way of America in Salvador. In '84, I met with the Jesuits who were later murdered at the university there. I had tasted American courts and American prisons. I'm trying to explain my first reaction: So it's come home at last.

Within a week or so, I opened the Hebrew Bible to the book called The Lamentations of Jeremiah. And I found there a very powerful antidote to the poison that was running deep in the veins of authority here. Evidently, this bystander of the destruction of the holy city was giving us permission to go through an enormously redemptive and healing labyrinth of emotions, emotions that one would think superficially the Bible would not allow for. But he allows the bystanders and the survivors to speak of enormous hatred of God, a spirit of revenge against the enemy, a guilt in view of one's own crimes and inhumanity, a hatred of those who have wrought this upon us, etc., etc. These are all the tunnel, the very deep tunnel, of psychology and spirit that the Bible opens before us. I began to understand that unless we went through that, we would never come out to the light again, and that that would be true of myself, as well. I began to understand that the foreshortening of that lonely and difficult emotional trek was a clue to Mr. Bush and the war spirit, and that unless one were allowed the full gamut of human and inhuman emotions, one would come out armed and ready with another tat for tit.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Father Dan Berrigan speaking in 2002. He died on Saturday at the age of 94.

[Peter Lemkin]

Jeremy, I want to ask you about the death of Father Dan Berrigan, who died Saturday at the age of 94. Along with his late brother Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the antiwar and antidraft movement during the late '60s, as well as the movement against nuclear weapons. Jeremy, you were a dear friend of Dan and Phil Berrigan's. Can you talk about the significance of the life of Dan Berrigan, and just tell us who he was and what he meant to you?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, I would say that, you know, I actually may not be here if it wasn't for Dan Berrigan. My dadboth of my parents are nurses. And my dad grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and he was going to be a seminarian. And, you know, his parents were Irish immigrants, very Catholic family. He was the only boy in the family. It seemed like a sort of fait accompli that he was going to have to be a priest. And he went to school, and he studied theology. And then, in the mid-1960s, there was the emergence of what was known in the United States as the Catholic leftpeople like Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; Thomas Merton, whothe brilliant Trappist monk, who was one of the early intellectual voices against the war in Vietnam; and then these two rebel priests, Father Daniel Berrigan and Father Philip Berrigan. And Dan Berrigan had given a talk that my dad went to, and it deeply impacted my father, and he basically left home and moved to New York to the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And it forever altered who our family was and the sort of moral code that we were taught as children.
I mean, I grew up knowing of the Catonsville Nine, Philip and Dan Berrigan and seven of their friends going into the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, in May of 1968 and taking hundreds of draft files that were being used to draft primarily African Americans in that area into the war in Vietnam. Of course, black Americans were deployed disproportionately to Vietnam along with the poor. And Phil Berrigan had been a civil rights priest, a member of the Josephite order, and had participated in the Freedom Rides in the South. Dan Berrigan was already a fairly famous literary figure. He had won a major poetry prize for his first book of poetry. And for these two priests, in their full religious garb, to have led this kind of a protest and then burn these draft files with homemade napalm reverberated around the world, and it energized a movement of young Catholics and people of faith to become very, very political about the war in Vietnam. And it also inspired a series of actions similar to Catonsville in Camden, in Milwaukee, around the country, where people, saying that they were motivated by their religious faith, going into draft boards and burning draft cards or pouring blood on draft cards. So I grew up in a household where Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day and Phil Berrigan and the late, great Dave Dellinger, legendary peace activist, one of the Chicago Eight in the conspiracy trial stemming from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968
And sobut I didn't meet Dan Berrigan because of that. I was in school at the University of Wisconsin, where I waswell, I would just say that I was enrolled in school; I wouldn't necessarily say that I was participating in school. But I was doing work with people who were homeless, and I decided I didn't want to be at the university anymore, and I hitchhiked out to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1995. And at thatand I had no idea that the entire peace movement was descending on D.C. that summer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I remember seeing all of these people that I had been told about during my childhood were the real heroes of our society and whose books lined my father's bookshelf in our small apartment that we lived in as little kids. And one day, IDan Berrigan came. And he was outside of the Pentagon, just standing like anyone else. And to me, you know, it would be like seeing LeBron James, you know, for some kids today, where it was like, "Oh, my god! This is Father Daniel Berrigan!"
And anyway, I went up and introduced myself to him. And we were standing around, and Liz McAlister, who, of course, is an amazing activist and just an incredible, wonderful person, who also was Phil Berrigan's partner and of course one of Dan Berrigan's closest people ever to him, sheI think she realized that I was a little bit awestruck by being around Dan Berrigan, and she said, "Hey, kid, would you mind escorting Father Berrigan to go and use the bathroom?" And this is pre-9/11, so, you know, I'm like, "Wow! I get to walk Dan Berrigan to a bathroom!" And I didn't know it, but weit was pre-9/11: We could actually go into the Pentagon. So I walked into the Pentagon with Father Daniel Berrigan, who had served time in federal prison for burning the draft files they had used to send so many people to the war in Vietnam. And when we walked in, as uniformed members of the military were walking out, they greeted Dan Berrigan as though he was like ayou know, a cousin that they see from time to time at family reunions, because he had spent so much time protesting there. And then, we go into the Pentagon, and we're in the bathroom, you know, using their facilities. And Dan says to me as we're standing there, "You know, in the 1940s, when Roosevelt authorized the building of this place, there was talk of it being converted to a hospital when the war was over." And then he sort of pauses, and he says, "And, you know, in a way, they kept their word. It's the largest insane asylum in the world."
And that started my relationship with Dan and Phil Berrigan, and I ended up living with Phil Berrigan, painting houses for the better part of a year and a half. And really, it was like having an alternative education. I always say that Iyou know, I list as my university, on social media, Democracy Now! And I would say that the combination ofAmy, of hearing you for the first time on the radio and discovering this whole world of Pacifica and community media, and then having daily conversations with people like Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister and Daniel Berrigan, really shaped who I wanted to be. And, you know, I put a picture up on Twitter, Amy, of you sitting with Dan Berrigan when my book Dirty Wars came out, and I was just saying that, you know, without these two, meaning you and Daniel Berrigan, I would not be who I am today and not be about what I'm about today.
And, you know, I don't think we were shocked by the death of Dan. I mean, he was almost 95 years old. He was in very frail physical condition. But this man was just a moral giant and the closest thing we have in our society to a prophet. And last night I was watching one of the networks. The only real coverage, outside of Democracy Now!'s beautiful show on Dan Berrigan, was on Chris Hayes's show on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes played a clip of Chris Wallace, who's now of course the Fox News Sunday host and son of the legendary 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace. And it was in 1981, and Chris Wallace says to Dan Berrigan, basically, "Well, you used to be famous, but nobody really pays much attention to what you do these days." Meanwhile, a year earlier, they hadDan and his colleagues had gone into this nuclear plant at the General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and hammered on Mark 12A warheads, starting the Plowshares Movement, which became global. But Dan's response to Chris Wallace was just classic Dan Berrigan and also just sort of stunning in its simple brilliance. He said, "Well, you know, we don't view our conscience as being tethered to the other end of a television cord." And I thought that it was justyou know, it was such a commentary on the dingbat factory in Washington versus someone whose entire life was about not just saying something, like so many of these pundits do, but standing there. And, you know, I always loved what Dan Berrigan wrote about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, when she died. He said that Dorothy Day lived as though the truth were actually true. So, too, to Dan.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jeremy, I thank you for introducing me to the Berrigans, Phil Berrigan, before he died, and Dan Berrigan. And it was really coming full circle when my colleague and co-author Denis Moynihan and I went up to Fordham to visit Dan a few years ago, to be able to bring him your latest book, Dirty Wars. Now, I want to go to anoh, we also brought him one other thing: ice cream. His favorite food, ice cream. But
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, can I tell you one thing about Dan Berrigan and ice cream that not that many people know? First of all, Dan Berrigan loved ice cream, and his fridge was always stocked with ice cream. But he loved ice cream so much that it caught the attention of Ben & Jerry's, the Vermont ice cream company, manufacturer. And theyyou know, they contribute to a lot of progressive causes. And Dan Berrigan and the Black Panther, Bobby Seale, and Michelle Shocked and Pete Seeger and Spike Lee all appeared in a Ben & Jerry's ad. And I think Dan's was like mocha chocolate fudge, and he's holding it up as though it's sort of like a Eucharist, you know, the communion at church.
But Dan was given, by Ben & Jerry's, a lifetime supply of the ice cream, for anyso any event the Catholic Worker would have that Dan was involved with, Dan would make sure that like, you know, a massive like crate of Ben & Jerry's was delivered. He always had it in his freezer. And if he would walk into an ice cream shop somewhere and they had Ben & Jerry's, he would tell them that he was Dan Berrigan and he has a right to as much ice cream and ice cream for his friends. And so, I also think that it was allowed to be transferred to some of his family members. Frida Berrigan, Dan's niece, who you had on the show yesterday, who's a dear old friend of mine, she and I once went into awe were outside of a trial that was going on for some antinuclear activists, and we went into a Ben & Jerry's shop. And Frida saidlooked at the poster of Dan, was up on the wall there, and she said, "That's my uncle, and I demand my free ice cream." And they actuallythey said, "Really, you're Dan Berrigan's niece?" She said, "Yes." They said, "What do you want?"
AMY GOODMAN: And they had a flavor named after him, right?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, Raspberrigan, yeah. No, it'she loved life. He loved ice cream. And the thing thatyou know, sometimes when wewe look at the clips of Dan Berrigan, that are now increasingly circulating around online, and I encourage young people to look at them, but what you often don't hear about these sort of incredible giants of our time, you know, Dan Berrigan, theprobably, you know, along with Pope Francis, the most famous Jesuit in modern history, and certainly the Jesuit who has had the most impact around the world in terms of confronting war and confronting the church's complicity in making war, but you don't necessarily know that theseDan Berrigan was a hilarious person. He was warm. He was funny. And he loved to gather among friends and have a little whiskey, and occasionally he would smoke a cigarette out the window of theyou know, of his apartment. And his home was just lined with posters and art from all of these people who Dan had walked the Earth alongside in his struggles. Even his bathroom was just wall to wall with photos of images of protest and resistance. And, you know, I'll justI'll never forget the feeling that people who had the honor of being around Dan would get just by hearing his infectious laugh. Both he and Phil wouldwere capable of laughing to the point of tears. And to see these guys, who were such militant confronters of the U.S. empire, also enjoying just the existence on this planet and the people around them is really what I'll never forget.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to end with an excerpt of Dan Berrigan. He was interviewed on NBC's Today Show back in 1981. Again, this was him being interviewed by Chris Wallace.

CHRIS WALLACE: Back in the Vietnam days, the Berrigan brothers were big. You attracted tens of thousands of people. Now you're not as big. You do not attract the same attention.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Mm-hmm.

CHRIS WALLACE: Is that hard for you?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No, I don't think we ever felt our conscience was tied to the other end of a TV cord. I think we've tried for a number of years to do what was right, because it was right.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Father Dan Berrigan on The Today Show in 1981. His funeral will be held on Friday in New York City at 10:00 a.m. at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on West 16th Street in New York.

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/9/one...ies_daniel [for watching the video]

More than 800 people packed into the Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York Friday for the funeral of Daniel Berrigan, the legendary antiwar priest, poet and activist. He died on April 30 at the age of 94. Today would have been his 95th birthday. Dan and his brother, the late Phil Berrigan, made international headlines in 1968 when they and seven other Catholic antiwar activists burned draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland, to protest the Vietnam War. Prior to the funeral, hundreds took part in a two-hour procession beginning at Mary House, a Catholic Worker house in the East Village. Democracy Now!'s Mike Burke was there and spoke to participants including singer Dar Williams, the Rev. John Dear, Dan's niece Frida Berrigan, Kathy Kelly and John Schuchardt, who was arrested with Dan in 1980 when they broke into the GE nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, launching the Plowshares Movement.

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AMY GOODMAN: More than 800 people, though, packed into the Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York Friday for the funeral of Dan Berrigan, the legendary antiwar priest, poet and activist. He died April 30th at the age of 94. Dan and his brother, the late Phil Berrigan, made international headlines in 1968 when they and six other Catholic antiwar activists burned draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland, to protest the Vietnam War. Prior to the funeral, hundreds took part in a two-hour procession beginning at Mary House, a Catholic Worker house in the East Village in New York. Democracy Now!'s Mike Burke was there and spoke to participants.

ANNA BROWN: I believe we're going to start our march now, and so I would think that we would want to create some space here, maybe walk together arm in arm, linked, again, with great energy, with chanting, with song, because this is a celebration of Dan's life and of life itself.

PROCESSIONISTS: [singing] Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more.

MIKE BURKE: Can you begin by telling us your name and why you're here today?

DAR WILLIAMS: I'm Dar Williams. And I'm here because I wrote a song that had to do with the Catonsville Nine, and then everything changed. As soon as I wrote that song, I met all of the people who were part of that song. And here I am, you know, 15 years later.

MIKE BURKE: Do you think you could sing a verse of that song right now?

DAR WILLIAMS: Sure. It goes:

[singing] God of the poor man this is how the day began
Eight co-defendants, I, Daniel Berrigan
And only a layman's batch of napalm
We pulled the draft files out
We burned them in the parking lot
Better the files than the bodies of children

I had no right but for the love of you
I had no right but for the love of you

So it's like a prayer, saying to God, you know, "They tell me I had no right to do this, and I had no right to do this but for the love of God."

REV. JOHN DEAR: I'm John Dear, and walking here along the streets of Manhattan to remember Daniel Berrigan. We're just passing the Catholic Worker house where Dorothy Day lived and worked, Dan's great friend, who's going to soon be canonized. And I'm here with all our friends on the way to the funeral to commemorate Dan, one of the greatest peacemakers of our times, my great friend, who called us to take to the streets and to say no to war and injustice and nuclear weapons, and to put nonviolence into action.

MIKE BURKE: And how did Father Berrigan influence both the peace movement as well as the Catholic Church?

REV. JOHN DEAR: Daniel Berrigan inspired millions upon millions of people after the Catonsville Nine action tothe symbolic act of the Catonsville Nine, especially him, but he and his brother as priests. This has never happened before, and it was so shocking. But it led to millions of people taking to the streets and inspired the peace movement. And you could arguethere were 300 draft board raidsit helped end the draft and helped end the war.

But then he changed, in the process, the church, Catholic Church in the United Statesactually all the Christian churchesand the church around the world. We never had a priest so publicly actively against war. Now it's normal. And a priest going to jail and prison for peace, now that happens all the time. But he broke the new ground and, in effect, helped get rid of the "just war" theory and return us all back to the peacemaking life of Jesus, which was the point of the church. So, he's not only a great saint and a great prophet, he's actually one of the great revolutionaries who's inspired the movement and changed the church. It's quite an accomplishment.

PROCESSIONISTS: [singing] We ain't gonna study war no more,
We ain't gonna pay for war no more.

MIKE BURKE: Can you begin by telling us your name and how you knew Father Berrigan.

FRIDA BERRIGAN: My name is Frida Berrigan. I'm Dan Berrigan's niece. And yeah, it's raining, and we're on Houston Street, and we're remembering him and all the times he stood in the rain, and there weren't 300 people, and there wasn't a band, and there wasn't all of this joy. And we're reminded that like this isthis is where it happens, right? Doesn't happen in the classroom. It doesn't happen from the altar. It happens in the street. And it happens those places, too, but not without this.

TED GLICK: Hi, my name's Ted Glick. I met Daniel Berrigan in 1970, when I was active in the antiwar movement of the Vietnam War, the draft resistance movement. I mainly got to know him in prison. We were both in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for draft board raids, him for the Catonsville raid in 1968 and me for a draft board raid in 1970.

MIKE BURKE: Can you describe what happened at Catonsville and then describe the significance?

TED GLICK: Catonsville was where nine people went into a draft board, Catonsville outside of Baltimore. They took the 1-A files, the files of young men who were liable to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. They took them outside, and they put homemade napalm on them and burned them. That was thethere was one other small action before that in Baltimore in the fall of '67. This one in May of '68 was the one that got lots of attention, lots of publicity. And it started a movement, that I ended up getting involved with, of people who went into draft boards all over the country, as well as corporate offices, FBI offices a couple of times, and took direct action, nonviolent direct action, serious direct action, against war and injustice, particularly against the Vietnam War, of course, at that time. So the significance was that for the antiwar movement, it gave a real shot in the arm to that movement at that point in time. And it continued to do so with the growing number of these types of actions that just continued to multiply over the next three, four years.

ANNA BROWN: My name is Anna Brown. I'm a member of the Kairos Community. I'm here primarily today, first of all, because I loved Dan very muchI've been a member in community with him for 25 yearsand because he was such a great force of love in this world. In the Catonsville Nine, he talks about the creation of a new order of gentleness, of kindness, of loving community. And we just don't do that. We just don't do that. And I think that's why there's been this incredible response to his death, because, really, he's all about life. And in a time where we're watching children drown in the Aegean Sea and climate change is barreling down upon us, though we remain in denial, and we're fighting war after war, someone who speaks about love is someone who we need to listen to. But not only spoke about it, acted on it, did it, so consistently. I can tell you Dan was doing civil disobedience almost to the end of his life.

MIKE BURKE: Can you begin by telling us your name and how you knew Father Berrigan?

JOE COSGROVE: I'm Joe Cosgrove, and I've known Dan Berrigan for more than 35 years. Dan was my pastor, but I was in theology and law. Well, gee, what two better subjects thanto put to use for Dan Berrigan? So I was his lawyer then for over those 30 years and in all sorts of matters and issues that hewhen he was arrested many times in New York and other matters and civil rights issues.

MIKE BURKE: Can you describe some of the more memorable cases that you represented Father Berrigan?

JOE COSGROVE: Well, you know, that, as I said last night at his wake service, Dan turned everything into liturgy. So, for me, I'm litigating, but for him, it was a sacrament. And to see that contrast. So, his statements and his testimony in court, every one of them were scriptural. I think, in particular, at the resentencing of the Plowshares Eight, which after this decades-long appeal process, when there werethe case was overturned, the conviction was overturned, then it was reinstated, but then the judge was removed. And then, finally, after 10 years, it seemed that there was an exhaustion in the legal system, and the resentencing was ordered, with a new judge. And because of my work in that system, I was doing most of the work at the resentencing. And Dan's statement to the court isit's one of the most profound things I've ever heard from a historical, from a legal and from a theological point of view. He combined all three. And it's poetry. Dan's a pot. It's scriptural. He's a scripture scholar. It's liturgical. It's beautiful. And that really, I think, is one of the crowning moments inmaybe in American legal history, to have that statement read in court, stated in court.

MIKE BURKE: Do you remember any of the lines from that statement?

JOE COSGROVE: He said, "If you think that putting me in jail will help end the war, then take me away."

PROCESSIONISTS: [singing] I ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more.

MIKE BURKE: If you could begin by telling us your name?

ART LAFFIN: My name is Art Laffin, and I'm with the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C. And the sign that I'm holding, I hold every Monday morning at our Pentagon peace vigil, 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. The vigil has been going on since 1987. And

MIKE BURKE: For our radio audience, what does the sign say?

ART LAFFIN: Well, the sign says, "No cause, however noble, justifies the taking of a single [human] life, much less millions." It's a quote from a talk that Dan gave on the ethic of resurrection. But it sums upit sums up his unequivocal commitment to nonviolence, which is rooted in the scripture. His life was staked on the command "Thou shall not kill" and to love your enemies.

COLLEEN KELLY: My name is Colleen Kelly. And I don't remember the first time I met Dan. I know it was somehow connected to Covenant House, when I worked at Covenant House years ago. But he made an enormous impression on my life in many, many ways. And I think one of the things that sticks out for me is my brother was killed on September 11th here in New York City, and in the shock of all that, within the first week, I went to go see Dan and just talk to him aboutabout this tragic, awful thing that like was so incomprehensible and impossible to understand. And I don'tDan was a poet, and I don't really get poetry all that much, butand I don't knowyou know, he was a wise man, and I can't tell you a wise phrase that he told me that night. But I can tell you, like, his heart just came and enveloped my heart. And I knew at that momentnot at that moment. It was likeit was just Danhaving Dan's backup and love and compassion, it made it very clear that the only way to respond to the violence that had happened was nonviolently and with justice. And it feels like Dan helped me understand that in ways I never thought I would concretely have to understand. And I was so glad that he was a part of my life prior to that, so that hehe was there in that really awful, awful, tragic moment.

MIKE BURKE: If you mind telling us your name, how you met Father Berrigan and why you're here today?

JOHN BACH: My name is John Bach. I was a draft resister during the war in Vietnam. And I first met Dan in the dining hall of the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. And it was love at first sight.

MIKE BURKE: And what do you think is most important for people to know about Father Berrigan?

JOHN BACH: That freedom and liberation are things that you can declare for yourself. And when you do that, you never lose a step, and you help your community move forward into the light.

MIKE BURKE: And how long did you spend in jail?

JOHN BACH: I spent 35 months, just under three years. And I can say, because of Dan, because of what he taught memost of the time I was not with the Berrigansthat it was three of the most formative, spiritual, educational and, in some ways, fun years of my life. I have no regrets whatsoever.

MIKE BURKE: Do you know of any other draft resisters who spent longer periods in jail than you?

JOHN BACH: There was only one.

MIKE BURKE: And what are your thoughts today as we march, you know, in the rainy streets of New York, as we head towards the church?

JOHN BACH: That there is a spirit working among us that strikes us free, as we work together on behalf of other people. And the best we could do at the end of our lives is to ask ourselves two questions: Were we well loved? And did we serve other people? And for Dan, there's a rousing affirmative, unquestionably, about that.

KATHY BOYLAN: So, I'm Kathy Boylan. I'm a Catholic Worker from Washington, D.C. And I was 24 years old on May 17, 1968, turned on the radio, andI don't think it was WBAI, but I was in New Yorkand I heard the story of Catonsville. And I was already the mother of two little children; I had another baby on the way. And I describe myself as, standing up, a different person, one with a view of taking responsibility for trying to end the war in Vietnam. The day before, I didn't think it was my responsibility. So that's howI first met him in the story on the radio of Catonsville, of the Catonsville Nine action.

But then I got to meet him. I was in the prison yard at Danbury in '72 with Dan when Phil was released from thehe got a six-year sentence, I believe, for Catonsville. So I was thenby then, from '68 to '72, I was already part of the community. Then I heard Dan say, in quoting the Isaiah scripture, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks." And he said, "Well, who are these 'they' who are going to do this beating swords, if not us?" And so that's led me to swim to a Trident submarine and hammer on various implements of war. I've been arrested. I am so happy. I am so blessed. It was miraculous that I listened to that radio program on May 17, 1968. My whole life is different because of it.

PROCESSIONISTS: [singing] Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more.
Down by the riverside
Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more.

KATHY KELLY: My name is Kathy Kelly. I'm a co-coordinator of Voices for a Creative Nonviolence. And I'm here out of deepest respect and appreciation for Dan Berrigan and for the very wonderful community that has come together to remember his life and to be grateful.

MIKE BURKE: And what impact has Dan had on your life?

KATHY KELLY: You know, as a teenager, if I got on the express bus early, I could get downtown before starting work and go to St. Benet's bookstore and read about Dan Berrigan. And since that time, he's had a strong shaping effect. I was very impressed that in 1991, when a group of people from the United States assembled to go and kind of interpose ourselves between warring parties in Iraq, and people said what motivated them, over half the group had been motivated by Dan Berrigan's words. And likewise in Afghanistan, young kids now know about his work and read his poems. And it's pretty wonderful to hear that a whole group of mainly Pashto students stood up and cheered after a Hazara student read a poem by Dan Berrigan that moved him.

MIKE BURKE: Can you begin by telling us your name and how you knew Father Berrigan?

JOHN SCHUCHARDT: John Schuchardt from the House of Peace in Ipswich, and my wife Carrie. I met Dan about 40 years ago, exactly this time of year 40 years ago, at Mary House, where we began the walk this morning. And it has guided and influenced the following 40 years of my life in a major way. And my wife Carrie met Dan when she was 16 years old. And that, too, was a formative influence in her entire life. So that led to Jonah House and, ultimately, to nuclear resistance, and then forming a community of eight to go into the nuclear weapons factory at General Electric in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, September 9th, 1980.

MIKE BURKE: Can you go back to that day in 1980, and describe what you did and why you did it?

JOHN SCHUCHARDT: Well, we had beenBrandywine Peace Community had been vigiling at plant number nine, where there were 600 workers making the nuclear warhead, the Mark 12A first-strike nuclear warhead. And as we vigiled thereand I joined the vigil a number of times, came up from Jonah House and vigiled with Bob Smith and the Brandywine communitywe realized that we could get into that plant. And if what we understood was true, that this was a crime, that this was the manufacture of genocidal nuclear weapons, each warhead 35 Hiroshimasand there's no such thing as a non-genocidal nuclear weapon, but these are, each one, 35 Hiroshimasis it enough to stand outside and vigil?

And we decided it really wasn't, that we could go in and stop production. We decided that we would enter with the workers at the peak of the morning workday. I think it was about 7:00 a.m. in the morning. And Carl, Father Carl Kabat, and Sister Anne Montgomery would talk to the guard there, distract that guard, while the rest of us went into the plant. And as it turned out, we found two warheads in the early stage of production, took hammers to them, rendered some of the manufacturing equipment unusable, stopped the manufacturing process and poured our human blood, which we had drawn from ourselves, on the work orders and the blueprints and the office details of this genocidal work.

MIKE BURKE: Could you describe the influence of Father Berrigan on your life and what you feel is most important for people to know about him?

CARRIE SCHUCHARDT: Well, first of all, going back to Vietnam, he had a powerful influence on me. And at the time of Plowshares Eight, I had just taken two Vietnamese boat refugees, and then many, many more, and that led eventually to the founding of the House of Peace for refugees and children of war. Dan was always asking, "How are the children?" And the last visit we made a couple of months, "How are the children?" And the influence of somebody who had such unbreakable, unrelenting moral awareness and direction and courage, and the ability to affirm everybody that was in it with him. And he loved people. He loved the people of this city. He lovedhe loved.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from a procession heading to Father Dan Berrigan's funeral on Friday. He would have turned 95 years old today

[Peter Lemkin]

Bearing the Cross

Posted on May 8, 2016

By Chris Hedges

Mourners follow the hearse carrying the casket of the Rev. Daniel Berrigan during a procession after his funeral service at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Friday in New York City. Berrigan, a Roman Catholic priest and peace activist since the Vietnam War, died April 30 at 94. (Mary Altaffer / AP)


NEW YORKI arrived early Friday morning, after walking through the rain, at the St. Francis Xavier Church in Greenwich Village for the funeral of the Rev. Daniel Berrigan. I stood, the church nearly empty, at the front of the sanctuary with my hand on the top of Dan's rosewood casket. It was adorned with a single red carnation and a small plaque that read: "Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan. Born May 9, 1921. Entered S.J. August 14, 1939. Ordained June 21, 1952. Died April 30, 2016."
The walls of the Romanesque basilica had large murals, by German artist William Lamprecht, of the stations of the crossPilate's condemnation of Jesus, Jesus collapsing under the weight of the cross, Jesus nailed to the cross and crucified. Lamprecht had muted the colors so each successive scene was darker and more ominous than the previous one. A Tiffany stained-glass window, with its glints of light, portrayed the Madonna and child. Over the large sanctuary, with its rows of wooden pews, hung soft, milky-white, bulbous lamps. The blue-veined marble altar, the graceful arches, the Carrera marble floor and the towering organ with its 3,323 pipes gave the moment solemnity and grandeur, although Dan relentlessly challenged the pomp and power of all institutions, including the church.
Dan, like his brother, Philip Berrigan, and his close friends Dorothy Day from the Catholic Worker Movement and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, led a life defined by the Christian call to bear the cross. This is the central call of the Christian life. It is one few Christians achieve. The bearing of the cross, in Christian theology, is counterintuitive. It says that the "the last shall be first, and the first last." It demands nonviolence. It holds fast to justice. It stands with the oppressed, those who Dan's friend, the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was murdered by the death squads in El Salvador, called "the crucified people of history." It binds adherents to moral law. It calls on them to defy through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance with state laws, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with God's law.
If you bear the cross, you often go to jail or, in Dan's case, federal prison for 18 months, after he, his brother and seven other religious activists in 1968 burned 378 draft files of young menmost of them African-Americanabout to be sent to Vietnam. The activists had manufactured homemade napalm to set the documents on fire in garbage cans in the parking lot outside the building from which they took the files.
In her eulogy, Elizabeth McAllister, Dan's sister-in-law, read the statement Dan wrote for the group, known as the Catonsville Nine:

Our apologies good friends
for the fracture of good order the burning of paper
instead of children the angering of the orderlies
in the front parlor of the charnel house
We could not so help us God do otherwise
For we are sick at heart
Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children …
We say: Killing is disorder
life and gentleness and community and unselfishness
is the only order we recognize …
How long must the world's resources
be raped in the service of legalized murder?
When at what point will you say no to this war?
We have chosen to say
with the gift of our liberty
if necessary our lives:
the violence stops here
the death stops here
the suppression of the truth stops here
this war stops here …

The 2,000 mourners erupted in a prolonged standing ovation.
Danwhose 50 books of poetry, essays and Scripture commentaries, as well as his play, "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," are as important a contribution as his activismwas the bête noire of senior church officials, including the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the peace activists, fabricated a case accusing the Berrigan brothers of conspiring to blow up tunnels under federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and kidnap Richard Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Dan, who took part in the Freedom Rides and civil rights marches in the South, was in and out of jail all his life. With seven other activists, he illegally entered a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa., in 1980. They poured blood and hammered the fragile cones of Mark-12A warheads. He had been, by the time he died a few days short of his 95th birthday, arrested hundreds of times. This, he said, was the cost of discipleship.
"But what of the price of peace?" he asked in his book "No Bars to Manhood."

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm ... in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plansthat five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. "Of course, let us have the peace," we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties." And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costsat all costsour hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lostbecause of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of warat least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Bearing the cross is not about the pursuit of happiness. It does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress. It is not about achieving wealth, celebrity or power. It entails sacrifice. It is about our neighbor. The organs of state securityin Dan's case, the FBImonitor and harass you. They amass huge files on your activities. They disrupt your life. And in Friday's homily, the Rev. Stephen Kelly, evoking laughter, welcomed the FBI agents who had been "assigned here today to validate that it is Daniel Berrigan's funeral mass so they can complete and perhaps close their files."


"Daniel and Phil exposed the historical alliance of religious leaders who colluded with structures of domination," said Kelly, who has spent more than a decade in prison for acts of nonviolent protest.
"The imperial power of Pax Romana ran aground on the shoals of Christian steadfastness," he went on. "But through the centuries the circle of outcasts and martyrs dissembled. They gained ascendancy to the power they were meant to resist. Daniel and Phil untied, illegally, those held in power's captivity. They risked retaliation. They touched the idol of the state."
Dan, who went underground for four months after burning the draft files, was on the FBI's most-wanted listthe first Catholic priest in the country to hold that distinction. But he and his small circle of activists pushed the clergyincluding my fatherout of their pulpits and into the streets to denounce the Vietnam War, especially after Dan founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam in 1965 with Rabbi Abraham Heschel. He traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn in 1968 on a peace mission and returned home with three U.S. Air Force personnel who had been held prisoner. He and Zinn made the men promise they would no longer take part in the war. Dan spent time with church communities working with the poor in Latin America. He visited, unnoticed, the activists at Manhattan's Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement and walked through the crowd, giving his silent blessing.
"This is the worst time of my long life," he said when I interviewed him for The Nation magazine a few years ago. "I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I find those expectations verified in the paucity and shallowness every day I live."
Yet he refused to despair. The cross, he knew, is carried even in the face of inevitable failure. This is the absurdity of faith. Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly made reference to this reality of Christian life, saying, "When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning … The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately you die on."
Dan's worldly possessions, including his small collection of threadbare clothes, could barely fill two suitcases. He was as opposed to abortion as he was to the death penalty, a stance that did not always endear him to many left-wing activists. He denounced the violence employed by the left during the Vietnam War, especially the Weather Underground, writing, "No principle is worth the sacrificing of a single human being." He knew the poison of violence. He saw no hope in the farce of managed electoral politics, quoting Emma Goldman, who said, "If voting was that effective it would be illegal." He feared dark and disastrous times, especially as we savaged the environment, and he told me that all we may have left is the "Eucharist and each other."
Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian whose words are misinterpreted and misused by conservatives and the powerful, including Barack Obama, wrote about the importance of being a "Christian realist." No one defined this concept more than Dan. He saw the world for what it was. He had no illusions about it. He understood the power of evil. He knew how seductive it was. As a solitary individual, he could accomplish nothing without community. His duty was to bear the cross, even if it did not make sense, even if it did not seem to make a difference. He was sustained by others and majestically sustained those around him.
Dan provided, for me, the most cogent definition of religious faith.
"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he told me. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanely and carefully and nonviolently and let it go."
A bagpiper played as Dan's casket was loaded into the back of a silver and black hearse outside the basilica. Hundreds of mourners, their cheeks streaked by rain and tears, filled the street. I stood on the steps.
It was a few blocks from here, at the shrine of the Church of St. Anthony of Padua, that Dan baptized my youngest daughter five years ago. He cradled her in his arms and spoke of faith as resistance. He reminisced about marching in Selma with Dr. King. He asked us to each say out loud what qualities we hoped my daughter would possess. Dan said he wished for "a sense of humor."
The hearse moved slowly down the vacant street. A man held his fist in the air. Some in the crowd sang a hymn. When the hearse reached the end of the street, its luminous red tail light began to blink on and off in the drizzle, signaling a right turn. Then it was gone.

A change is coming. I can feel it.